A personage of some note was in London this year, the eldest son of Rob Roy,――James Drummond Macgregor. He seems to have previously petitioned Charles Edward for pecuniary help, on the ground of suffering from the persecution of the Hanoverian government, and to have been willing to serve that government on his own terms. In the introduction to ‘Rob Roy,’ Sir Walter Scott says that James Drummond Macgregor made use of a license he held to come to London, and had an interview, as he avers, with Lord Holdernesse. ‘His lordship and the Under-Secretary put many puzzling questions to him, and, as he says, offered him a situation, which would bring him bread, in the government’s service. This office was advantageous as to emolument, but in the opinion of James Drummond, his acceptance of it would have been a disgrace to his birth, and have rendered him a scourge to his country. If such a tempting offer and sturdy rejection had any foundation in fact, it probably related to some plan of espionage on the Jacobites, which the government might hope to carry on by means of a man who, in the matter of Allan Breck Stewart, had shown no great nicety of feeling. Drummond Macgregor was so far accommodating as to intimate his willingness to act in any station in which other gentlemen of honour served, but not otherwise; an answer which, compared with some passages of his past life, may remind the reader of Ancient Pistol standing upon his reputation. Having thus proved intractable, as he tells the story, to the proposals of Lord Holdernesse, James Drummond was ordered instantly to quit England.’ [Sidenote: _JACOBITE PARAGRAPHS._] The son of Rob Roy, hated and suspected by the Jacobites, got over to Dunkirk, but he was hunted thence as a spy. He succeeded in reaching Paris, ‘with only the sum of thirteen livres for immediate subsistence, and with absolute beggary staring him in the face.’ The hopes of the friends of the Stuarts were encouraged by a paragraph in the London sheets of 1754 stating, that though the Chevalier was suffering from sciatica, he was well enough to receive a stranger (in June), ‘who, by the reception he met with, was supposed to be a person of distinction. Two days later, the banker, Belloni, had a long private conference with the Chevalier. What passed was not known, but what followed _was_; namely, a large sum of money was advanced by the banker.’ It is easy to imagine how paragraphs like the above stirred the pulses at the Cocoa Tree and at St. Alban’s coffee-house.